The last four years has seen the mobile app market explode. Brands were shifting their digital budget to accommodate an app presence with the fear of falling behind competitors. App creation sky rocketed as brands realised the need to engage with customers on the new flexible and accessible platform.

Today, the app market has matured to the point where app usage currently sits at 86 per cent of all mobile activity. Of the 2 hours and 42 minutes spent on mobile devices, 2 hours and 19 minutes is spent on apps.

The mobile application is here to stay and brands have realised the importance of engaging with their customers on this valuable touch point as part of an omnichannel strategy. The challenge now is for brands to understand their customer’s needs and their affinity and engagement with the brand to create an app that serves a useful purpose. We are beyond the point where brands need to build an app to have a mobile presence – apps should support the overall brand experience, not be an experience that sits detached from other touch points such as the website.

Brand Affinity

Brands are likely to have more success with an app if there is already an established relationship with their customer. In retail, we all have favourite places to buy clothes, electronics or even a coffee on the move. Thriving brands in the mobile space realise that apps can cement loyalty and reinforce affinity. If you are a regular drinker of Starbucks coffee and you search for your nearest branch on your mobile, you are prompted to download the app to extend your relationship with the brand. The app then gives the likes of Starbucks the opportunity to provide personalised offers, loyalty schemes and competitions to encourage further engagement.

A simple function

The most effective apps are extremely simple in concept and purpose. In the early days when brands were starting to build their mobile presence, apps were sometimes a poor extension of the website and were difficult to engage with and
encouraged drop-outs. If a brand’s mobile efforts weren’t useful we steered towards the website or away from the brand completely. The best apps perform a simple set of functions that solve a problem or task quickly and simply, with a quick and responsive interface. Banking is a perfect example of where apps work really well as they perform a simple task and don’t require much input from customers. Simple tasks such as balance transfers and payments can be made swiftly without fuss.

Through apps, brands are able to improve our lives, making light work of menial, lengthy tasks, no longer on a fixed PC but on the move – all helping to develop a positive brand experience.

Who are you targeting?

The better apps out there have targeted a particular audience or market segment. In retail, early app efforts didn’t take into account the differences between a desktop customer and a mobile customer. As mentioned above, if you have downloaded an app, you are probably a fan of the brand in question and will require different engagement than browsers or passers-by. For example, a fashion retail brand will need to realise that its app audience might not be interested in all the lines and ranges available. The app serves as an opportunity to be more personalised with relevant garments that match the shopper’s tastes. The app shopper is more likely to be loyal to the brand, making impulsive purchase decisions in a lunch break or on the journey home. App content and user experience should reflect this to provide a proposition that suits this customer base.

Mobile websites

The evidence above suggests that while app usage is maturing, brands shouldn’t detract away from creating useful optimised mobile websites. Research shows that 48 per cent of all mobile research starts via a mobile search engine, proving that mobile websites are an important part of customer engagement. Mobile websites that fail to load properly or perform poorly are a huge gripe for mobile users. It’s a major failing by some brands to link-up their multichannel presence with an engaging mobile site as 46 per cent of mobile web users are unlikely to return to a website that
they had trouble accessing from their phone. Given the number of users that search for brands via their mobile, this represents a massive drop off rate of customers that wish to interact.

The mobile space provides copious opportunities for businesses to prosper and extend their brand experience. With the mobile app market maturing, failure to create an effective presence that caters for an important customer segment could result in major losses in revenue. Despite the fact that the hours people are spending on mobile devices and apps is starting to level out, there is still a significant window of time for brands to enhance their customer relationships, increase affinity and conversion rates.

 

By Peter Gough, Design Partner & Founder of ORM.  


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